Blog posts from February 2013

This week the room is busy again, following a week of absences due to fungus and bacteria as well as a bunch of traveling around.

There is much talk of afterschool club and Saturday’s hackday. Alice and Simon are preparing the studio for forty people, we’ve been told to defrag our work places, and resolve any complex desk landscapes. Alice is also on the refactoring-dev-tools-for-bergcloud hamster wheel. I am told there are many tools, and much tippy tappy is required in order to refactor them.

Simon is back from holiday and spinning up his brain following a week of sanfranhangovers. Jones is curating a blog post discussing some work from a couple of years back that we’re able to show.

Andy, Neil and Mark are all working hard on Kachina

Nick and Joe are doing some fun wrangling with Unity for Kemp, and some hardware experiments with the iPhone.

Matthew is prepping for big meetings next week and working with lawyers.

I have spent twenty minutes trying to sign into WordPress and will now be doing the same for other web based workplaces.

They had already in mind another brief before approaching us, to create a physical product encapsulating Google voice/video chat services.

This brief became known as ‘Connection Box’ or ‘Connbox’ for short…

For six months through the spring and summer of 2011, a multidisciplinary team at BERG developed the brief based on research, strategic thinking, hardware and software prototyping into believable technical and experiential proof of a product that could be taken to market.

It’s a very different set of outcomes from Lamps, and a different approach – although still rooted in material exploration, it’s much more centred around rapid product prototyping to really understand what the experience of physical device, service and interface could be.

As with our Lamps post, I’ve broken up this long report of what was a very involving project for the entire studio.

The video call is still often talked about as the next big thing in mobile phones (Apple used FaceTime as a central part of their iphone marketing, while Microsoft bought Skype to bolster their tablet and phone strategy). But somehow video calling has been stuck in the ‘trough of disillusionment’ for decades. Furthermore, the videophone as a standalone product that we might buy in a shop has never become a commercial reality.

On the other hand, we can say that video calls have recently become common, but in a very specific context. That is, people talking to laptops – constrained by the world as seen from webcam and a laptop screen.

This kind of video calling has become synonymous with pre-arranged meetings, or pre-arranged high-bandwidth calls. It is very rarely about a quick question or hello, or a spontaneous connection, or an always-on presence between two spaces.

Unpacking the brief

The team at Google Creative Lab framed a high-level prototyping brief for us.

The company has a deep-seated interest in video-based communication, and of course, during the project both Google Hangouts and Google Plus were launched.

The brief placed a strong emphasis on working prototypes and live end-to-end demos. They wanted to, in the parlance of Google, “dogfood” the devices, to see how they felt in everyday use themselves.

I asked Jack to recall his reaction to the brief:

The domain of video conferencing products is staid and unfashionable.

Although video phones have lived large in the public imagination, no company has made a hardware product stick in the way that audio devices have. There’s something weirdly broken about taking behaviours associated with a phone: synchronous talking, ringing or alerts when one person wants another’s attention, hanging up and picking up etc.

Given the glamour and appetite for the idea, I felt that somewhere between presence and video a device type could emerge which supported a more successful and appealing set of behaviours appropriate to the form.

The real value in the work was likely to emerge in what vehicle designers call the ‘third read’. The idea of product having a ‘first, second and third read’ comes up a lot in the studio. We’ve inherited it by osmosis from product designer friends, but an excerpt from the best summation of it we can find on the web follows:

The concept of First, Second, Third Read which comes from the BMW Group automotive heritage in terms of understanding Proportion, Surface, and Detail.

The First Read is about the gesture and character of the product. It is the first impression.

Looking closer, there is the Second Read in which surface detail and specific touchpoints of interaction with the product confirm impressions and set up expectations.

The Third Read is about living with the product over time—using it and having it meet expectations…

So we’re not beginning with how the product looks or where it fits in a retail landscape, but designing from the inside out.

We start by understanding presence through devices and what video can offer, build out the behaviours, and then identify forms and hardware which support that.

To test and iterate this detail we needed to make everything, so that we can live with and see the behaviours happen in the world.

Material Exploration

We use the term ‘material exploration’ to describe our early experimental work. This is an in-depth exploration of the subject by exploring the properties, both inate and emergent of the materials at hand. We’ve talked about it previously here and here.

What are the materials that make up video? They are more traditional components and aspects of film such as lenses, screens, projectors, field-of-view as well as newer opportunities in the domains of facial recognition and computer vision.

Some of our early experiments looked at field-of-view – how could we start to understand where an always-on camera could see into our personal environment?

We also challenged the prevalent forms of video communication – which generally are optimised for tight shots of people’s faces. What if we used panoramic lenses and projection to represent places and spaces instead?

We also experimented with the visual, graphic representation of yourself and other people, we are used to the ‘picture in picture’ mode of video conferencing, where we see the other party, but have an image of ourselves superimposed in a small window.

We experimented with breaking out the representation of yourself into a separate screen, so you could play with your own image, and position the camera for optimal or alternative viewpoints, or to actually look ‘through’ the camera to maintain eye contact, while still being able to look at the other person.

One of the main advantages of this – aside from obviously being able to direct a camera at things of interest to the other party – was to remove the awkwardness of the picture-in-picture approach to showing yourself superimposed on the stream of the person you are communicating with…

There were interaction & product design challenges in making a simpler, self-contained video chat appliance, amplified by the problem of taking the things we take for granted on the desktop or touchscreen: things like the standard UI, windowing, inputs and outputs, that all had to be re-imagined as physical controls.

This is not a simple translation between a software and hardware behaviour, it’s more than just turning software controls into physical switches or levers.

It involves choosing what to discard, what to keep and what to emphasise.

Should the product allow ‘ringing’ or ‘knocking’ to kickstart a conversation, or should it rely on other audio or visual cues? How do we encourage always-on, ambient, background presence with the possibility of spontaneous conversations and ad-hoc, playful exchanges? Existing ‘video calling’ UI is not set up to encourage this, so what is the new model of the interaction?

To do this we explored in abstract some of the product behaviours around communicating through video and audio.

We began working with Durrell Bishop from LuckyBite at this stage, and he developed scenarios drawn as simple cartoons which became very influential starting points for the prototyping projects.

The cartoons feature two prospective users of an always-on video communication product – Bill and Ann…

This single panel from a larger scenario shows the moment Bill opens up a connection (effectively ‘going online’) and Ann sees this change reflected as a blind going up on Bill’s side of her Connbox.

Prototyping

Our early sketches on both whiteboards and in these explorations then informed our prototyping efforts – firstly around the technical challenges of making a standalone product around google voice/video, and the second more focussed on the experiential challenges of making a simple, pleasurable domestic video chat device.

For reasons that might become obvious, the technical exploration became nicknamed “Polar Bear” and the experimental prototype “Domino”.

Prototype 1: A proof of technology called ‘Polar Bear’

In parallel with the work to understand behaviours we also began exploring end-to-end technical proofs.

We needed to see if it was possible to make a technically feasible video-chat product with components that could be believable for mass-production, and also used open-standard software.

Aside from this, it provided us with something to ‘live with’, to understand the experience of having an always-on video chat appliance in a shared social space (our studio)

Andy and Nick worked closely with Tom and Durrell from Luckybite on housing the end-to-end proof in a robust accessible case.

It looked like a polar bear to us, and the name stuck…

The software stack was designed to create something that worked as an appliance once paired with another, that would fire up a video connection with its counterpart device over wireless internet from being switched on, with no need for any other interface than switching it on at the plug.

We worked with Collabora to implement the stack on Pandaboards: small form-factor development boards.

Living with Polar Bear was intriguing – sound became less important than visual cues.

Every so often, you look up and look around you, sometimes to rest your eyes, and other times to check people are still there. Sometimes you catch an eye, sometimes not. Sometimes it triggers a conversation. But it bonds you into a group experience, without speaking.

Prototype 2: A product and experience prototype called “Domino”

We needed to come up with new kinds of behaviours for an always on, domestic device.

This was the biggest challenge by far, inventing ways in which people might be comfortable opening up their spaces to each other, and on top of that, to create a space in which meaningful interaction or conversation might occur.

To create that comfort we wanted to make the state of the connection as evident as possible, and the controls over how you appear to others simple and direct.

The studio’s preoccupations with making “beautiful seams” suffused this stage of the work – our quest to create playful, direct and legible interfaces to technology, rather than ‘seamless’ systems that cannot be read or mastered.

In workshops with Luckybite, the team sketched out an approach where the state of the system corresponds directly to the physicality of the device.

The remote space that you are connecting with is represented on one screen housed in a block, and the screen that shows your space is represented on another. To connect the spaces, the blocks are pushed together, and pulled-apart to disconnect.

Durrell outlined a promising approach to the behaviour of the product in a number of very quick sketches during one of our workshops:

Denise further developed the interaction design principles in a detailed “rulespace” document, which we used to develop video prototypes of the various experiences. This strand of the project acquired the nickname ‘Domino’ – these early representations of two screens stacked vertically resembling the game’s pieces.

As the team started to design at a greater level of detail, they started to see the issues involved in this single interaction: Should this action interrupt Ann in her everyday routine? Should there be a sound? Is a visual change enough to attract Ann’s attention?

The work started to reveal more playful uses of the video connection, particularly being able to use ‘stills’ to communicate about status. The UI also imagines use of video filters to change the way that you are represented, going all the way towards abstracting the video image altogether, becoming visualisations of audio or movement, or just pixellated blobs of colour. Other key features such as a ‘do not disturb blind’ that could be pulled down onscreen through a physical gesture emerged, and the ability to ‘peek’ through it to let the other side know about our intention to communicate.

Product/ID development

With Luckybite, we started working on turning it into something that would bridge the gap between experience prototype and product.

The product design seeks to make all of the interactions evident with minimum styling – but with flashes of Google’s signature colour-scheme.

The detachable camera, with a microphone that can be muted with a sliding switch, can be connected to a separate stand.

This allows it to be re-positioned and pointed at other views or objects.

This is a link back to our early ‘material explorations’ that showed it was valuable to be able to play with the camera direction and position.

Prototype 3: Testing the experience and the UI

Final technical prototypes in this phase make a bridge between the product design and experience thinking and the technical explorations.

This manifested in early prototypes using Android handsets connected to servers.

Connbox: Project film

Durrell Bishop narrates some of the prototype designs that he and the team worked through in the Connbox project.

The importance of legible products

The Connbox design project had a strong thread running though it of making interfaces as evident and simple as possible, even when trying to convey abstract notions of service and network connectivity.

I asked Jack to comment on the importance of ‘legibility’ in products:

Connbox exists in a modern tradition of legible products, which sees the influence of Durrell Bishop. The best example I’ve come across that speaks to this thinking is Durrell’s answering machine he designed.

When messages are left on the answering machine they’re represented as marbles which gather in a tray. People play the messages by placing them in a small dip and when they’ve finished they replace them in the machine.

If messages are for someone else in the household they’re left in that persons bowl for later. When you look at the machine the system is clear and presented through it’s physical form. The whole state of the system is evident on the surface, as the form of the product.

Making technology seamless and invisible hides the control and state of the system – this path of thinking and design tries to place as much control as possible in the hands of the end-user by making interfaces evident.

In the prototype UI design, Joe created some lovely details of interaction fusing Denise’s service design sketches and the physical product design.

For instance, I love this detail where using the physical ‘still’ button, causes a digital UI element to ‘roll’ out from the finger-press…

A very satisfying dial for selecting video effects/filters…

And here, where a physical sliding tab on top of the device creates the connection between two spaces

This feels like a rich direction to explore in future projects, of a kind of ‘reverse-skeuomorphism‘ where digital and physical affordances work together to do what each does best rather than just one imitating the other.

Conclusion: What might have been next?

At the end of this prototyping phase, the project was put on hiatus, but a number of directions seemed promising to us and Google Creative Lab.

Broadly speaking, the work was pointing towards new kinds of devices, not designed for our pockets but for our homes. Further explorations would have to be around the rituals and experience of use in a domestic setting.

Special attention would have to be given to the experience of set-up, particularly pairing or connecting the devices. Would this be done as a gift, easily configured and left perhaps for a relative who didn’t have a smartphone or computer? How could that be done in an intuitive manner that emphasised the gift, but left the receiver confident that they could not break the connection or the product? Could it work with a cellular radio connection, in places where there no wireless broadband is found?

What cues could the physical product design give to both functionality and context? What might the correct ‘product language’ be for such a device, or family of devices for them to be accepted into the home and not seen as intrusive technology.

G+ and Hangouts launched toward the end of the project, so unfortunately there wasn’t time in the project to accommodate these interesting new products.

However we did start to talk about ways to physicalize G+’s “Circles” feature, which emphasises small groups and presence – it seemed like a great fit with what we had already looked at. How might we create a product that connects you to an ‘inner circle’ of contacts and the spaces they were in?

Postscript: Then and Now – how technology has moved on, and where we’d start now

Since we started the Connbox project in the Spring of 2011, one could argue that we’ve seen a full cycle of Moore’s law improve the capabilities of available hardware, and certainly both industry and open-source efforts in the domain of video codecs and software have advanced significantly.

Making Connbox now would be a very different endeavour.

Here Nick comments on the current state-of-the-art and what would be our starting points were we (or someone else) to re-start the project today…

Since we wrapped up this project in 2011, there’s been one very conspicuous development in the arena of video chat, and that is the rise of WebRTC. WebRTC is a draft web standard from W3C to enable browser to browser video chat without needing plugins.

As of early 2013, Google and Mozilla have demonstrated this system working in their nightly desktop browser builds, and recorded the first cross-browser video call. Ericsson are one of the first groups to have a mobile implementation available for Android and iOS in the form of their “Bowser” browser application.

WebRTC itself is very much an evolution of earlier work. The brainchild of Google Hangout engineers, this single standard is implemented using a number of separate components. The video and audio technology comes from Google in the form of the VP8 and iLBC codecs. The transport layer has incorporated libjingle which we also relied upon for our Polar Bear prototype, as part of the Farsight 2 stack.

Google is currently working on enabling WebRTC functionality in Chrome for Android, and once this is complete, it will provide the ideal software platform to explore and prototype Connbox ideas. What’s more, it actually provides a system which would be the basis of taking a successful prototype into full production.

Notable precedents

While not exhaustive, here are some projects, products, research and thinking we referenced during the work…

Thanks

Massive thanks to Tom Uglow, Sara Rowghani, Chris Lauritzen, Ben Malbon, Chris Wiggins, Robert Wong, Andy Berndt and all those we worked with at Google Creative Lab for their collaboration and support throughout the project.

Friday Demos are, well, every Friday in the studio – where we, yes, demo what we’ve all been working on that week. It’s the highlight of most of our weeks, catching up with all the projects in the room over cheap beer bought from the store on the corner – and getting wowed by a surprise or two, usually from Andy, Nick, Alice or Adam…

I know it’s Tuesday, but I meant to post this little Vine experiment a while back… so thought I’d do it today before I forgot.

Week 402 in the BERG studio sees a number of folk on holiday – Simon and Mark are missed, while Helen has subjected herself to Wildfire Protocol and as a result is home fighting a cold.

Joe is in Belgium as I type, giving a talk about some of the studio’s processes, habits and approaches to work. I had a sneak preview yesterday and it’s a cracking presentation – hope it makes it online.

Nick’s finishing some work on Saguaro, then the rest of the week is devoted to all things BERG Cloud: bolstering our monitoring capabilities, working with phil wright on some revisions to new electronics for Chelly, and some software revisions to the infrastructure of BERG Cloud so it’s more able to accommodate things other than Little Printer in the near-future… He’ll also be leading chats with the team around improving the BERG Cloud API.

Adam’s making servers in BERG Cloud better, paying special attention to scaling; and participating in the BotWorld design thinking.

Alice is making some important changes to our shop, to be able to sell new rolls of paper to people!

Neil’s working with Andy on Kachina, and spending some quality time in Little Printer Hospital fixing people’s LPs to send back to them.

Denise is working on Chevelon, Saguaro’s final-final-final tweaks, and then devoting the rest of her time to some new Little Printer stuff coming your way soon…

Alex is doing some work on the next iteration of the BERG Cloud Remote UI, thinking and designing how we organise and present the panoply of LP publications we are starting to get, getting prepped for the next LP hack day, and excitingly, helping to design the Little Printer exhibit for the upcoming Designs Of The Year show at the Design Museum.

The Olympic Cauldron vs Little Printer. Which would you rather have in your kitchen?

We’re up against the London Olympic Cauldron by Thomas Heatherwick in the product design category, so to make sure we’re not upstaged I’m imagining he’ll be bringing his best Danny-Boyle-showman-instincts into play and we’ll be getting LP to abseil into the museum from Tower Bridge or something.

Kari’s doing her usual awesome job of BERG Cloud and Little Printer customer service, particularly at the moment sending out paper rolls to keen folk who have been printing like the clappers since they got their Little Printer.

Fraser’s talking to prospective Little Printer publishers, and dealing with some upcoming public appearances for the little fella at some exhibitions and events, including we think, SxSW…

Matt Webb in his own words, is “on the hustle” this week, which constitutes – amongst other things – property negotiations (we have to move out of our current studio building soon as it’s being demolished!), interviews (with him), sales, and deputising for Simon on projects.

Charlatan/Martyr/Hustler by Joey Roth – sits in the entrance to our studio…

It’s also his birthday week – he’s a spritely 35!

I’m working remotely with Timo, to document some past project work we hope to put public soon, writing weeknotes and pursuing some sales opportunities for future studio work.

We really want to line-up some exciting projects in the domain of connected products, services and hardware for the summer, so if you have something you’d like to work with us on, please get in touch.

I know Sunday is an unusual day to publish the weeknotes but working aboard the good ship BERG is not a nine-till-five. God put his feet up on Sunday, but just think what he might have created if he wasn’t so lazy…

Light-hearted blasphemy aside, here’s a retrospective look at the highlights of week four hundred.

Norsk harbinger of sublime design, Timo Arnall, was in the studio at the beginning of the week, diligently flexing his final cut and blog-writing muscles. He has now returned to Oslo to continue his PHD work – hopefully we’ll be able to see the fruits of his labour soon. Phil Gyford also returned to Corsham street this week to do some final work for Sagguaro.

Matt Jones finally brought his baby twins Olive and Bryn in to meet the studio and there was much cooing and delight from everybody. I was simply amazed to see they weren’t wearing Vulpine onesies…

Joe has been working hard on Shiprock and he’s really not used to proper work anymore so now he’s made himself ill. While he was at home keeping Lemsip in business, we all enjoyed seeing and playing with the first prototype of his brainchild known as ‘project Kemp’ (Joe believes projects should be named after fictional hard-men rather than Colorado rocks). Get well soon Joe!

Little Printer in one form or another is on the minds of most of us in the studio. There is so much complexity, unique work and bubbling potential hidden in that cute white cube, and it is carefully being unlocked as the weeks go by with Alice, Alex, Denise (who’s also been in client workshops this week), Adam and Nick all working on new publications and features. Simon, Helen, Kari and Fraser have also been working hard with Little Printer-related endeavours, dealing with customers and organising further production. As well as working on project Kemp and Kachina, Andy and I have been trying to get to the bottom of physical performance issues with Little Printer, conducting post-mortems on customer returns and testing new parts.

In some ways it feels like BERG is more McLaren than Macintosh; Little Printer is a piece of mass-produced consumer electronics, but rather than simply shifting units designed to be obsolete when the next lot of SKUs is shipped, we are honing, tuning and learning from our creation, developing new features, functionality and flexibility to improve the customer experience. It is quite unique to work in this way, and Jack and Matt W have been working hard the last few weeks to ensure we continue to do so.

Good morning citizens of the Internet! My quiet revolution to bring back Friday Links is limping along, inasmuch as some people always remember and some people always forget. My latest idea is maybe what we need is an animated glitter GIF? Also, maybe some confused metaphors? What if that’s what’s missing?

SO what hairballs of greatness have the cats that I work with coughed into my litter box this week?

Alex sent us an animated GIF of how a lock works. You’ve likely seen this already being the hip plugged in individuals that you are, but in case you haven’t, behold:

If you would like to see inside a key factory (the answer is ‘YES’), there is a video for that too:

Denise went to Design of Understanding last Friday, it sounded excellent. She returned with many stories, chief among them, that of the ex-mayor of Bogota:

“Famous initiatives included hiring 420 mimes to make fun of traffic violators, because he believed Colombians were more afraid of being ridiculed than fined”

Denise shared Autographer, “the worlds first intelligent, wearable camera”, made by the amazingly named OMG PLC. (Calm down everyone, OMG stands for ‘Oxford Metrics Group’). Autographer combines a bunch of sensors and an camera to take photos at the best moments throughout the day.

Matt Jones sent an article about building moon bases using 3D printing with the materials available on the surface of the planet.

And that concludes Friday Links! Happy Friday everybody. February will be better, I promise.